Discuss this article in the
SERVO Magazine forums at http://forum.servomagazine.com

and

NOW

Eddie: RDS4 Meets
Kinect Meets Parallax
by Tom Carroll

Last month, I discussed Willow Garage’s TurtleBot — an advanced experimenter’s robot
based on WG’s ROS (Robot Operating System) which was first developed at Stanford.
This unique robot uses the iRobot Create as the motive base for the robot. The key
component is the Microsoft Kinect sensor system developed for the Xbox 360 game
system. The TurtleBot follows in the footsteps of its big brother — Willow Garage’s
$400,000 PR- 2 personal robot designed for serious (and deep pocketed) robot
experimenters.

This month, I want to cover another advanced experimenter’s robot that seems to be as impactful to
the robotics market as the TurtleBot. This new machine is
Eddie, shown in Figure 1. It was developed by Parallax in
conjunction with Microsoft (the developers of RDS4,
Robotics Developer Studio) and the Kinect sensor. I’ll be
comparing features of both robots at various points in this

FIGURE 1. Parallax’s
Eddie robot.

article. As with the TurtleBot, Eddie uses a laptop computer
for the main processing power. However, the laptop for
Eddie is left opened and the keyboard is available to use on
the robot, whereas the TurtleBot has its Asus netbook
closed and inserted in one of the slots. Eddie is certainly
not the first robot to use a laptop; recall amateur builder
Dave Shinsel’s Loki that uses an ‘exposed’ laptop for a
processor as shown in
Figure 2.

FIGURE 2. Dave
Shinsel's Loki.

Evolution
Robotics
ER-1

The use of an exposed
laptop atop a mobile robot
was also the design of a
commercial robot by
Evolution Robotics.
Evolution’s $599 ER-1
personal robot is shown in
Figure 3 and was introduced
about a decade ago. It
operated on what they
called ‘RDK,’ or their Linux-based Robot Development
Kit. The ER-1 was also
available as a kit for $499
and used an ‘x-beams
aluminum building system,’